Tuesday, 18 September 2012

Even climate alarmists get filtered by the SMH

The SMH environmental section today carried a story lifted from the Guardian about how the Arctic will be free of summer ice by 2015-16. That claim was made by Professor Peter Wadhams:

"This collapse, I predicted would occur in 2015-16 at which time the summer Arctic (August to September) would become ice-free. The final collapse towards that state is now happening and will probably be complete by those dates".

Interestingly, the good Professor was also featured in the Grauniad last week, but his message that time clearly didn't please the likes of Ben Cubby, the environmental editor at the SMH. Why is that? Well, look at what Professor Wadhams had to say then:

A leading British academic has called for accelerated research into futuristic geo-engineering and a worldwide nuclear power station "binge" to avoid runaway global warming.

Nuclear power? And not even a word about wind or solar? Can't print that!

Even worse, the professor then failed to say really bad things about Big Oil:

Asked whether the latest evidence made a ban on drilling for carbon-releasing oil and gas necessary as Greenpeace has contended, Wadhams said "philosophically" such exploration made little sense. "We have been conducting a global experiment with the burning of fossil fuels and the results are already disastrous and this would accelerate them," he argued saying that there were also practical worries because of the enormous difficulty of dealing with any spillage or a blowout under moving ice where oil would get trapped inside the ice in a kind of inaccessible "oil sandwich'.But he said at least that companies such as Shell had shown some responsibility by carefully planning its expected exploration in the Chukotka Sea off Alaska and had shown a willingness to use ready-made containment domes that could cap off a well if anything went wrong. He was more fearful about drilling methods in the Russian Arctic where environmental concerns were lower down the agenda.

That's an interesting bit of filtering by the SMH.

I just need to put an entry in my diary now for 2016 to see whether the prediction of an ice free Arctic in summer comes about.